Time is an Illusion, Lunchtime Doubly So
by
Font Bookfarthing
PROLOGUE
The story so far... In the beginning the universe was created. But how was it created? Of course the only answer available to that question has always been: the Big Bang. But what exactly was the Big Bang? And what caused it? So far nobody had been able to provide a satisfactory answer to those questions. And so it remained a mystery. In fact the very first time- traveling expedition to journey back in order to observe the birth of the universe, instead found themselves at a rather nice restaurant called the Big Bang Burger Bar. The intrepid explorers were shown to a table where they were able to watch the beginning of all things in comfort and... in company. They got out their sensors and computers, and measured and recorded the birth of the universe. But they were still not entirely clear on how it had started. And on top of that, they suddenly found themselves confronted with another mystery: where exactly did this Big Bang Burger Bar come from?
Clearly, they reasoned, it came from time travelers like themselves, but who had come from a time after this very first expedition to the origin of the universe. But how far into the explorers' own future? As the years went by, more and more people visited the Big Bang Burger Bar, but still nobody could say who had actually built it, or from what time period they had come.
Meanwhile Zaphod Beeblebrox and his colleague Zarniwoop conspired together to find out who it was who was secretly ruling the universe. Zarniwoop located the coordinates of the planet where the ruler lived in seclusion, and further discovered that it was protected by an Unprobability Field. Beeblebrox had the more complex task of the two. He removed the part of his memory relating to his motives and the conspiracy, became president of the galaxy, and then stole the Improbability Drive prototype ship the Heart of Gold, in order to get to the ruler of the universe.
After some detours, they eventually made it safely to the planet where the ruler lived, and found him to be a philosophical old man in a shack... along with his cat. But before they could fully interrogate him, Zaphod, who still only had half of his memory intact, left... stranding Zarniwoop on the planet.
During all this, a race of hyper-intelligent, pan-dimensional beings created the planet Earth, which was, in actuality, a gigantic super computer, in order to compute the question to the ultimate answer of life, the universe and everything. However, a consortium of high powered psychiatrists felt their livelihoods threatened by this. (They were however, unaware of the fact that the ultimate question and the ultimate answer were mutually exclusive and could not both be known in the same universe. Nor did they know that the Golgafrinchans had landed on Earth two million years before the programme was complete, causing the indigenous population to die out, thus ruining the experiment... supposedly.) And so they hired the Vogons to destroy the planet/computer Earth five minutes before the programme was complete.
However, thanks to the dolphins' "Campaign to Save the Humans," and the plural sector in which the Earth was located, the Earth kept returning along with everyone on it. Determined to get the job done, the Vogons ultimately bought out The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and with the help of the Guide Mark 2, manipulated the mysterious Grebulons into destroying the Earth along with the final three Earthlings still at large... or so they thought.
Eventually the Vogons sold the Guide back to Megadodo Publications and went back to handling the bureaucratic matters of the galaxy, and occasionally even blowing up planets... leaving one final Earthling unaccounted for...